Hey, I am wondering how popular Python is? I have been doing research of what programming language I should learn for Linux, I am use to using VB for Windows. I saw there are quite some BASIC apps for Linux. But then after reading a few sites claiming that BASIC is a lot slower then Python or Perl, I did a little more research and thought maybe I should learn Python. I went to the Python website and was a little confused cause I dont think there is a gui for programming python and that you have to use a text editor. I saw bluefish could be used, I used bluefish once on making a webpage so its something I am a little familiar with. Also, it seems that there is a huge war between python and perl..and they both seem to have a lot of the same features with a few different ones. I am going to be wanting to do some business apps but I also wanted to be programming some games, if I had enough free time I might want to get into OpenGL. Does python support this?

Thanx everyone for the help!! =)

I don't know of any 'war' between python and perl. they are both considered 'scripting' languages I believe, both are ran through an interpreter. Python's syntax may be a little easier to understand, especially if your aquainted with VB.
I don't know of any gui's for python or perl, but that most certainly doesn't mean they aren't out there. i just use text files and vi for programming. I don't think there is anything quit like visual studio for either one, with code completion and what not. There are a few Java IDE's that do code completion.
I can't tell you what language to learn, because i don't know what task you want to do. I think, although i have no game progamming experience, that you would want to use a language like C or C++ for gaming. OpenGL was originally written in C, but there are bindings for many languages, and i wouldn't be surprised if you can use OpenGL with python.

good luck

I don't know of any specific python gui, but you can use gVim..., it has autocomplete functions (which is not the same as intellisence..., but it helps)...
And as for game programming, I know there's a library called PyGames, I don't know if it uses OpenGL or not..., but it might help.....

Good luck!

Haora

Python is very popular and there are many IDEs/editors that allow you to write scripts, vim, emacs, boa-constructor (a full IDE writen in/for python), kate (standard editor that comes with KDE), kdevelop or even eclipse.

I haven't done anything like that, but I know that the libraries available for python are great and include game's development.

HTH!

Yea, after googling, I found pygames, but then also found info saying that if you were to do any full screen stuff that you are probably only going to get 15 to 20 fps using SDL. They said if I was to use DGA or Directx I would get up to 100 fps.
Reference: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pyt...ry/080200.html

About learning C, I thought that was one of the hardest, and that it takes alot longer to program in C then most other languages, unless you do assembly of course.

C is not too difficult to learn. It takes a little discipline to write C programs. C is very low-level, but there are libraries you can use so it's mostly calling functions and checking return values and variables that get passed by a pointer. Compiled C code runs very fast.

Python is pretty easy to learn and use. Once you learn it, you can create useful programs very quickly. It's very object oriented. Everything is an object in Python, which may annoy you. :) Python programs run pretty slowly, even when compared to Perl, but fast enough for most tasks. Games written with PyGame will actually run pretty fast, since you're pretty much using a skeleton of Python code to call lots of precompiled SDL C code.

Perl is ... well, Perl tries to make easy things easy, and hard things possible. Perl is spikey and full of special cases, shorthand notations, and lots of punctuation characters with special meaning. There's modules in Perl to do almost anything you want. I've heard Gandalf writes code in Perl.

I hear Ruby is nice. Never tried it. The Pragmatic Programmers like it. Dunno about OpenGL from Ruby.

For now, my favorite is Java. A simpler, cleaned-up version of C++. If interested, have a look at GCJ (the GNU implementation). And yes, you can use OpenGL from Java.

I just googled for "Python IDE" and got several good results on the first page. Other ones that I know of are Cherrypy and...actually I can't think of the other right now. I normally just use gedit to write code.

Never heard of any war between Python and Perl. Since you're familiar with VB, Python will probably be fairly easy for you to learn.

In Ye Olde Days, there was a bit of a friendly rivalry between Python and Perl. You can still see remenants of this:

http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/ce/old.html

If you watch the animated graphic at the top of the page, you will see the animated Python give the animated Camel (the O'Reilly Perl "mascot") the boot.

These days, things have settled down somewhat. The old rivalries tend not to mean as much any more. Who knows why? Your guess is as good as mine.